they spawn. They present
a marvellous combination of unquenchable enthusiasm and slovenly
inaccuracy. They needs must love the highest when they see it, but
they are congenitally incapable of describing it correctly. Their
conception of art consists of writing a book describing their own
sexual impulses. This is frequently so ungrammatical and obscure that
even publishers' readers balk at it, and it goes the rounds. In the
meanwhile, they produce an incredible quantity of daily and weekly
matter for the press. They wheedle commissions out of male editors by
appealing to their sex, and write sprightly articles on Bachelor Girls
and their Ideals, and the Economic Independence of the Married Woman.
They become hysterically lachrymose, in print, over a romantic love
affair, and relapse into sordid intrigues on the sly. They demand
political power without intending for a single moment to assume
political responsibility. Their days are about equally divided between
catching a husband and achieving what they describe as "a scoop."

To all this Miss Flaherty adds an unusual faculty for spectacular
antics. She has dressed in a red sweater and plied her trade, for a
day, as a shoe-shine boy. She has dressed in a green cloak and sold
shamrock on St. Patrick's day. She has dressed in rags and sung in the
streets for charity. She has hired a van and ridden about the suburbs
pretending to sell domestic articles. She has attended revival
meetings and thrown herself in a spasm of ecstasy upon what she calls
the mercy-seat. She has....

But the author is not absolutely sure whether she has ... after all.
He is of the opinion that, like most English women, she has no
talent for that sort of thing. Like most young women who babble of
emancipation she has an unsuspected aptitude for domesticity. She
makes tea far better than she writes articles. She is, under a
ridiculous assumption of slangy modernity, oppressively conventional.

However, the author's immediate concern is not with Miss Flaherty's
destiny at all, but with his manuscript which she has been XXXX
commissioned to place with a publisher. A writer of dime novels, on
being consulted as to the way to get a book published, said he didn't
know, never having had a book to publish save in weekly serial
numbers; and that, he hastened to observe, was quite another story.
And then suddenly remarked, slapping his thigh and reaching for the
makings of a fresh cigarette: "Why not try Im